| Social applications spark creativity and are appealing to the next generation,but their educational affordances are not a popular theme for scholars.Wechat is a nationally accepted chatroom,is one of the most approved mobile applications which is an asynchronous and synchronous messaging tool that are utilized to connect worldwide users with internet connection.It is a potential platform to share information which can facilitate online tutorials,owing to its pedagogical,social,and technological affordances.This study aimed to reveal the effects of chatting on Wechat and Face-to-face discussion on English as Foreign Language(EFL)learners’ writing proficiency.The participants are 80 sophomore ESL college students in Hunan Vocational College of Commerce.This experiment investigated the effects of different chat modes on writing fluency,syntactic complexity,accuracy and lexical diversity,as well as on writing performance of participants to explore the effectiveness of mobile mediation in L2 writing classrooms.In experiment we employed a mixed design: 2(tasks: Pretest,Post-test)*2(learning modes: Online,Offline)* 2(English level: High,Low)in which within-subjects are task and English level,between-subject is learning mode and the dependent variables are included in task(writing fluency,syntactic complexity,writing accuracy and lexical diversity).Pretest and post-test were all required to write a composition of College English Test Band 4.This study was conducted over an eight-week with sixteen discussions.All learners were equally divided into two groups: an online group and offline group,and the topic discussed were the same.The findings of the study showed that(1)the online group produced more average number of T-units per text compared to the offline group and chatting on Wechat group attained the higher proportion of dependent clauses of total clauses than the face-to-face discussion.(2)With the four variables of writing proficiency,learners are progressive or regressive as a whole,while only few of them are improved in one or two variables,but remain unchanged or decreased in the others.This paper selected four typical participants examples to make a detailed analysis.These findings contribute to an understanding of the educational nature of mobile applications in a second language and suggest implications for online-discussion practice in language pedagogy. |
